Black Friday ... But Cyber Monday?
By Steve Smith -- TWICE, 12/3/2007
Black Friday is one of those times during the year, like International CES, CEDIA or other conventions on the CE calendar we attend annually, where reporters who cover this business can hit the street, press the flesh and find out who's buying what and why without e-mail, voice mail or text messages being in the way.
But Black Friday is unique. I've often said to anyone in the industry who will listen that you usually learn more about what's really going on at retail when you speak to consumers ... such as friends and family, or when you visit stores, especially on that day.
It's always interesting to see consumer reactions to blockbuster deals that morning like $29 DVD players or $99 GPS systems from retailers and suppliers who for 364 other days of the year wring their collective hands and moan, "Why can't we make a profit in this business!"
As TWICE senior editor Alan Wolf points out in a front page story in this issue, Black Friday was less promotional than last year. And the crowds still came out ... but more on that later.
The whole Black Friday experience is a lot more fun than covering Cyber Monday, the National Retail Federation's creation from a couple of years ago. To cover this ersatz online event you can wait around for press releases from research groups or stock analysts or call them; you can visit top Web sites; or if you are really an intrepid reporter, you can visit social networking sites to see what people say they bought.
That's kind of dry stuff vs. seeing seemingly well-balanced adults claw over each other at 5 a.m. in the morning for new game system or 50-inch HDTV.
Hype about Cyber Monday seems to have a hit a new low this year when we received an email from a think-tank discussing this year's event — at 9:17 am Eastern that same day. (They must have an upscale crystal ball that peers into the future.)
I agree with Alan's blog on TWICE.com from last week when he took the media to task about treating Cyber Monday as "a full-fledged cultural event akin to Black Friday ... But surfing Web stores from your desk during office hours? Aside from the questionable ethics of shopping on your boss's time, all it does is tie up corporate bandwidth on a national scale, sending IT departments into a tizzy."
Rick Aristotle Munarriz of The Motley Fool (www.fool.com), agreed in a story last Monday, called "Cyber Monday Is A Joke." His contention was that Cyber Monday is now no more important than Black Friday or even Thanksgiving, in between second helpings of turkey and football games, and he backed his argument up with a few numbers.
As for this year's Black Friday, a few closing thoughts:
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Store traffic and sales were up vs. last year. But does that mean that consumers — with higher energy costs and a weakening economy on their minds — are going to continue to come out and shop at the same rate until the end of the year? Or will they wait for the next round of price cuts?
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The industry seemed less promotional than last year. But that was because pricing progressively went down during the year, and this year's prices didn't really shock anyone. How will lower prices across many categories affect the industry's profitability?
As usual, we should know by CES how all this really played out.
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